Mangum P.I.

One of the unquestionable rock masterpieces of the 1990's is Neutral Milk Hotel's "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea," the strange, creepy, trippy and ingenious product of singer/guitarist/songwriter Jeff Mangum. He only produced two albums - "Aeroplane" and the also-terrific "On Avery Island" - before disappearing, not just from the music scene but from the known world entirely.

So, here's what happened...This woman, Shannon, who shared a living space with Jeff and some other musicians back in her college days, has just realized that she has a tape featuring early Neutral Milk Hotel demos. This is stuff that not even the die-hard crazed NMH fans have heard before. And they're not some fuzzy, unintelligable home recordings of interest only to audiophiles. These are just great songs.

Rather than attempt to horde this material for herself, to hopefully profit from on Ebay or something like that, Shannon is very coolly just making the material available for free online download. Why not go download them for yourself?

Other songs from the demos are available on music blogs My Old Kentucky Blog and You Ain't No Picasso. I love discovering new music blogs, because you can go back for the past few months and get a ton of interesting new unknown music really quickly. Right now I'm listening to a band called The Attorneys from Brooklyn who are actually pretty good. Who knew?